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Forum:13: White Tiger's Gift
Xianmei brought news both good and uncertain to the party at the Starry Pavilion: The group had successfully discredited Wild Lao Jin and elevated Daggerfist Zheng in the eyes of Vajra , but Vajra also remembered the group from their first encounter from the descriptions given to him by both men. He dispatched Xianmei to bring them outside the city to meet on neutral ground, so that they might discuss their future. Xianmei naturally asked the party to keep their mutual plotting a secret. With a tentative trust, the group opted to accept this invitation and met the revolutionary on a hill outside Cao Luang, where he asked them why they had returned and if they were looking for revenge against his organization. They said that they had no quarrel with him and that the meeting with Lao Jin was a simple coincidence, the result of wanting to go to the Grand White Table for a drink which only turned violent when Lao Jin initiated hostilities. Vajra believed their story and offered them a magic item as an apology from master to victim for the misdeeds of his own student. He said that part of his quest to keep his students and the people of Jiang safe and strong involved finding out why the number of White-Haired slayings continued to increase, and how they might be prevented. He informed the party that the so-called "White-Haired Killers" were created as a result of a ritual associated with Baihu. The killers become something more and less than human; their skins become like iron and their bodies can be pushed to greater feats of athleticism than humanoids would normally be capable of. They are also rendered mute, and become immune to pain, fear, and poisons, possibly among other things. The group decided to follow up on news about a White-Haired killing that took place that morning, discovering that a nobleman had been killed by a slave he had tried to purchase, who turned into one of the White-Haired killers right before his eyes. The handler who tried to sell the slave escaped in the chaos, and the killer himself managed to escape the Cao Luang guard. The group opted to try and find the slave ship that brought him there, and Yahtuh's bargaining with a dockside tavernkeep earned him the name of the "Nine Red Wings", the only slaver-owned vessel in port that day. Boarding the vessel in secret, and departing from Jiang to offer them more time, the group happened upon the aftermath of a massacre, with slaver crewmen dead from one or two blows and the ostensible captain crushed to death beyond recognition. In the hold, however, the slaves were left alive but unconscious. A young girl heard the group board and began knocking on the wall to get their attention, and she informed them that the rest had been given a poison to keep them quiet while the ship was at port, but her friend Tomei had disappeared. The group escorted her up to the mid-deck, but were confronted with the sight of a blood-stained White-Haired killer emerging from the last cabin on the ship. The killer, who the young girl identified as Tomei, seemed ready to strike but stayed his hand when he seemed to realize that the group intended no harm towards his fellow slaves. He allowed himself to be escorted slowly up to the top deck but jumped ship when he realized he was far from Jiang, and the group deduced that he must have one more victim in mind who is still in Cao Luang. Though the group beat him back to shore, they had to hurry to find the location of this final victim. While they asked Yellow and the Nataraja to dispose of the evidence on the ship with Artyom's assistance, the remaining party members found a message on the ship identifying a farm house in northern Cao Luang that was ostensibly being used for storage. The group informed Vajra and Xianmei of their findings, but upon arriving discovered that they had been beaten to the estate by Tomei and all of the slavers at the house were dead. In the barn, however, the last crewman of the Nine Red Wings lay bleeding on the ground, both lungs punctured from a crushing blow. To the group's horror, the drow man could not be healed magically, possibly the result of a death curse placed on victims of White-Haired killers. Ten-Tongues instead opted for a radical mundane surgery, emptying blood from the man's lungs through precise incisions. With gasping breaths, the drow man informed them that the scroll-based copy of the ritual that Tomei somehow used was originally from Snezhny, but that many more copies of it were in circulation in Jiang. He professed with an almost satisfied grin that he had died the moment Tomei attacked him, and their discussion was only the group's reward for finding him while his body could still function. He finally uttered that the method of replicating the ritual would be found inside Tomei's body, and wished the group "Happy Hunting" before succumbing to his injuries. The group searched far and wide across the wilderness of Jiang's countryside for Tomei, but only found him after many exhausting hours right before sunrise, when the ritual was set to end Tomei's life. They found him sitting under a large tree, utterly exhausted and either unwilling or unable to move from the day's exertions. Though they offered food and drink, he would not take it, and though he was offered a quill pen and attempted to write, nothing but illegible scratches emerged. Ten-Tongues took the time to observe him, and discovered that the inside of his mouth and throat had been burned black and his muscles were severely injured as a result of what he had gone through that day, though he managed to run all the way out to the country before collapsing. The ritual also seemed to rob him of his linguistic faculties and complex reasoning skills, as even the Lordly Raven's attempt to communicate with him mentally resulted in only "animalistic instincts." When the first rays of the sun filtered through the trees, Tomei inhaled deeply one last time, and his soul exited his body with his last breath. On further analysis, Ten Tongues and Yahtuh found that Tomei was now unable to be brought back from the dead in any capacity, as his soul had been definitively and utterly decoupled from his body through divine intervention. They then checked for magical items and found something inside Tomei's gut, which Ten Tongues extracted. It was a very small scroll inside a casing of bone, no longer than a pen and narrow as a single reed of bamboo. Though they did not read it, the scroll ostensibly contained the ritual instructions; the prize sought by Vajra, and one of the many sources of Cao Luang's woes... 2000 exp for information discovery relating to the White-Haired Killers an Amulet of Natural Armour +1, as an apology from Vajra (claimed by Artyom). 1750 gold per person as the party's share of the sale of the re-possessed Nine Red Wings. The Lordly Raven unlocks a unique upgrade: Sniper Soul. Sneak attack range doubled and dice increases by 1d6. The Lordly Raven now has a scope attachment which can be fitted on top of its length for Medium-size users, or underneath for Ten Tongues.